One of the most delightful products of our industrial farming system is "pink slime," aka "lean, finely textured beef," a slurry of ammonia-treated cow byproducts mixed into ground beef as a filler. It's widely used in school lunches because growing children should get three servings of slime-based food per day. But now schools are ridding their cafeterias of pink slime.

After outrage and petitions, New York City public schools have promised to phase out pink slime, which has been determined to be safe to eat by the USDA, but is still gross. Other schools have already banned the stuff. "We're slime free," boasted a Board of Education member in Monclair, NJ. Slime is having its biggest moment since the heyday of Nickelodeon's You Can't Do That On Television.

Overprotective parents, these days, huh? Won't even let their little Mayas and Edens be fed a constant diet of bits of cow connective tissue that have been ground up, pressed into a fine paste and exposed to ammonia to fight bacteria. What's next, helmets on the playground? Feeding children slime is a good preparation for the dystopian war-torn sci-fi wasteland of a world they'll be inheriting from their parents. Let's get them started on gas masks, too.